Sora public-data review: a rate card with nine days left

What is being removed, and when

The wind-down ran in two stages and only the second is still ahead. OpenAI's deprecations page gives an announcement date of 24 March 2026 and a shutdown date of 24 September 2026, and lists six entries under one heading.

That empty replacement column is the whole story for developers. A normal model retirement is a string swap — you change sora-2 to whatever OpenAI names next and redeploy. Here there is nothing to swap to, because the endpoint itself goes with the models. Migrating means adopting another vendor's API and rewriting the request shape and the job-polling loop around it, which is days of work rather than an afternoon.

The consumer half went first. The Sora app and website were discontinued on 26 April 2026, well under a year after the app launched, with users directed to export their library before the cutoff. If you never exported, assume that material is gone; there is no site left to log into. The shutdown was reported at the time by TechCrunch, dated the same day as the deprecation notice.

What OpenAI still charges, as of 15 September 2026

Sora has no plans, no credits and no free tier. It bills per second of generated video, and audio is produced with the picture at every rate. These figures are transcribed from OpenAI's model reference pages for sora-2 and sora-2-pro.

Two different things are being charged for, stacked. The first is the model: at an unchanged 720p, moving from sora-2 to sora-2-pro costs exactly three times as much, $0.10 to $0.30, for no extra pixels at all. The second is resolution, priced again on top — within Pro, 720p to 1024p is +66.7% and 1024p to 1080p a further +40%, so 720p to 1080p inside the same model is +133%. Multiply the two and the cheapest Sora second and the dearest differ by exactly 7x.

The practical consequence is that sora-2 has no upgrade path that only buys resolution. Standard is a 720p-only model. Wanting 1080p means buying Pro's quality premium whether you wanted it or not, and the bill goes up sevenfold.

The twelve-second ceiling

OpenAI's Videos API reference states that the seconds parameter has "allowed values: 4, 8, 12" and "Defaults to 4 seconds". That is a harder constraint than any price on this page.

The reassuring half is that no single request can run away with your budget: $8.40 is the most one generation can cost, and the documented default — four seconds at 720x1280 on sora-2 — is the cheapest thing you can ask for at $0.40. The limiting half is that a one-minute piece is five separate generations stitched in an editor, with no continuity guaranteed between them. For comparison, Seedance 2.5 is documented at up to 30 seconds in a single pass with native audio. Sora was always a shot generator, not a scene generator, and the per-minute column above is an arithmetic convenience rather than something you could actually order.

Sora against the field, per second

Google publishes per-second rates for Veo 3.1 on the Gemini API pricing page, re-verified today, with audio included by default and no free tier. That makes it the one direct like-for-like on billing units, and the comparison is unflattering for OpenAI at every point except one.

Three things fall out of one sorted list. Sora has no cheap tier: its floor is $0.10 a second where Google's is $0.05, so the least you can spend on a Sora second is exactly double the least you can spend on a Veo one. They match on price at the same resolution exactly once, at $0.10 for a 720p second with audio, where sora-2 and Veo 3.1 Fast are identical to the cent. And the top of the card belongs to OpenAI: $0.70 for a 1080p second is the most expensive rate on this page, 75% above Veo 3.1 Standard at the same resolution and 5.8 times Veo 3.1 Fast's $0.12. Google's single dearest second of video — Standard at 4K, $0.60 — still comes in 14.3% below OpenAI's 1080p one. The sorted list throws up one more collision worth noticing: sora-2-pro at 720p and Veo 3.1 Fast at 4K are both $0.30 a second — the same money buys 720p from one vendor and 4K from the other.

A note on what that does and does not say. These are list prices for a second of output, not a quality ranking; CartSignal has generated no video and runs no prompt-adherence or motion tests. Two models at the same price may be nothing like each other on screen. What the table establishes is narrower and still useful: at no point on its own rate card did Sora hold a price advantage over the incumbent it was being compared against. Both these figures and Veo's sit inside the wider generative lane costed on best AI video tools, which runs from $3.00 to $36.00 a finished minute — Sora's $42.00 top row now extends it.

Every exit is cheaper

Forced migrations usually cost money. This one does not, at least on the meter. Taking each Sora row and the nearest Veo row at the same resolution:

The worst case is break-even. There is no row where a buyer pays more to leave. Whatever else the migration costs you in engineering time — and the empty replacement column means it is real engineering time — the recurring bill does not go up, and for anyone who was on Pro it falls sharply. That is the reverse of the usual shutdown, where the cheap incumbent dies and its users discover what the market rate is.

Two things OpenAI's own pages do not agree on

Both of these were checked today and are published as observations, not as a ruling on which page is right.

• The model pages carry no end-of-life notice. Nine days from removal, the sora-2 and sora-2-pro reference pages show a full rate card and per-tier rate limits — 25 requests per minute on Tier 1 rising to 375 on Tier 5 — with nothing on the page indicating the model is scheduled to be withdrawn. The create endpoint still documents all five model strings as valid values. A developer who lands on the model page rather than the deprecations page gets no signal at all that they are building against something with nine days to live.
• A priced resolution the endpoint does not list. The sora-2-pro page prices 1080x1920 and 1920x1080 at $0.70 a second, but the Videos API reference gives the allowed values of size as 720x1280, 1280x720, 1024x1792 and 1792x1024 — the 1080p pair is absent. One of the two pages is stale, and CartSignal cannot establish which from public data. Anyone budgeting against the $0.70 row in the next nine days should confirm the request is actually accepted before planning around it.

OpenAI's video generation guide separately notes that the remix endpoint, previously used to edit an existing generation, "is being deprecated" — so the editing path is going even before the models do.

If Sora is in your stack today

• Nine days is the real number, not September. Requests to the Videos API and every sora-2 alias stop being served on 24 September 2026. Anything scripted against it — a no-code automation, a scheduled job, a product feature — simply stops returning video on that date unless you built a fallback.
• Aggregators are not a reprieve. Resellers that proxy the official API lose access exactly when you do, because it is the same endpoint behind them. Treat any offer of continued sora-2 access after the removal date as unverified, and do not build on it.
• Price the replacement on your own resolution, not the headline. If you were on 720p standard, Veo 3.1 Fast is a straight swap on cost and Lite halves it. If you were on Pro at 1080p, almost anything is cheaper. Full breakdown of both routes into Veo — the per-second API and the credit-based Flow studio — is on the Google Veo profile.
• Re-check your clip length assumptions. Code written against a 12-second maximum may have batching and stitching logic that a vendor allowing longer single takes makes redundant, and vendors differ here more than they differ on price. Kling and Runway are the other two most commonly named destinations; Runway resells several third-party models on one credit meter, including Seedance.
• Do not forget the labelling duty. Changing generator does not change your obligations. Since 2 August 2026, EU AI Act Article 50 requires generative output to be marked machine-readably and requires you to disclose synthetic media you publish — see labelling AI video and voice under the EU AI Act.

The full migration shortlist, with each destination's plan prices and credit mechanics, is on Sora alternatives.

FAQ

Is Sora still available in September 2026?

Only through the API, and only until 24 September 2026. The consumer app and website closed on 26 April 2026. OpenAI's deprecations page, announced 24 March 2026, lists the Videos API and the strings sora-2, sora-2-pro, sora-2-2025-10-06, sora-2-2025-12-08 and sora-2-pro-2025-10-06 for removal, with a dash in the recommended-replacement column for every one. After that date OpenAI sells no video generation model at all.

How much does the Sora API cost per second?

sora-2 is $0.10 a second and exists only at 720x1280 and 1280x720. sora-2-pro is $0.30 at those sizes, $0.50 at 1024x1792 and 1792x1024, and $0.70 at 1080x1920 and 1920x1080. Audio is included at every rate. As finished minutes that is $6.00, $18.00, $30.00 and $42.00. Model and resolution are priced separately — Pro costs exactly 3x standard at an unchanged 720p — so the card's floor and ceiling differ by exactly 7x.

Will migrating off Sora cost more?

No. Every exit is cheaper or the same. Veo 3.1 Fast at 720p is $0.10, identical to sora-2's only rate; Veo 3.1 Lite at $0.05 halves it. At the top, sora-2-pro's $0.70 second at 1080p is 75% above Veo 3.1 Standard at the same resolution and 5.8 times Veo 3.1 Fast. Google's most expensive second of all, Standard at 4K for $0.60, is still 14.3% below OpenAI's 1080p second. These are prices, not quality judgements — no video was generated for this review.

How long can a single Sora clip be?

Twelve seconds. The Videos API reference gives seconds allowed values of 4, 8 and 12, defaulting to 4. So one request can cost at most $8.40, at Pro 1080p — but a one-minute piece is five separate generations stitched together with no continuity guarantee. That ceiling, rather than the per-second rate, is usually what decides whether Sora fitted a project.

Has CartSignal tested Sora?

No. This is a public-data review built from OpenAI's deprecations page, the sora-2 and sora-2-pro model reference pages, the video generation guide and the Videos API reference, all checked 15 September 2026, plus contemporaneous reporting of the March 2026 announcement. No video was generated and no quality claim is verified. Per-minute conversions, percentages and cross-vendor comparisons are CartSignal arithmetic over each vendor's own published rates.

Source links

• Official OpenAI deprecations page (announcement 24 March 2026, shutdown 24 September 2026, all six entries, empty replacement column)
• Official sora-2 model reference ($0.10/second, 720p sizes, synced audio, per-tier rate limits)
• Official sora-2-pro model reference ($0.30 / $0.50 / $0.70 per second by resolution)
• Official Videos API reference (seconds allowed values 4, 8, 12; size allowed values; model options)
• Official Gemini API pricing (Veo 3.1 Standard, Fast and Lite per-second rates, audio included, no free tier)
• TechCrunch, 24 March 2026 — contemporaneous reporting of the shutdown announcement